Li Bo 李波

“The Internet is very important to young people these days,” Li Bo says—not least to this artist himself. “All of my images are appropriated from the Internet and reassembled in a systematic way,” he explains. He paints this Web flotsam with meticulous realism, resizing the images to identical heights and lining them up against a colourless background. The result for viewers is simultaneous free association and disorientation. Grouped together with no context but each other, the images seem to be part of a secret code, challenging people to identify (or invent) connections between them. Of these there is “an endless stream”, Li Bo says. Cultural background plays a big role: most of his works include at least one allusion to Chinese history or current events. In Three Parts Falling in Love: Hidden Concubine Rabbit (2008), the policemen carrying the scarlet-clad “concubine” refer to the attempted censorship of a photograph by the Gao Brothers that was in turn based on a misinterpretation of a news photo.